Putting the puzzle together one piece at a time

Selling England By The Pound

With suitable apologies to Genesis, I’m not really about to breach your Copyright.

What am I going to do is make myfirst contribution to The Big Picture.

It was brought to my attention only this week that the great NHS Sale has begun. Apparently up to 400 community services are already up for grabs. The kind of services envisaged in this round might include wheelchair services and foot treatment to diagnostic tests, adult hearing and psychological therapies, with companies such as Specsavers, Boots and Alliance Healthcare potentially bidding for the contracts, alongside NHS hospital trusts, local medical centres and GP surgeries.

Labour’s Health Spokesman had the following to say “Be warned – Cameron’s Great NHS Carve- Up is coming to your community. As we speak, contracts are being signed in the single biggest act of privatisation the NHS has ever seen – 398 NHS community services all over England, worth over a quarter of a billion pounds, out to open tender. A forced privatisation, ordered from the top, and a secret privatisation – details hidden under ‘commercial confidentiality’ – but exposed today, in Labour’s NHS Check.”

The list of services up for tender under this system is many and various, but one at random for NE England lists the following services and their values